The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to monitoring valves or actuators in industrial environments.
Present industrial environments, particularly chemical and petroleum environments, have vast quantities of valves and actuators located over a potentially large area. Due to the potentially volatile nature of these environments, the ability to monitor the status of the valves and actuators throughout the facility is necessary. One way to monitor the status of valves and actuators is to couple position sensors thereto. The position sensors are configured to generate an electrical signal indicative of the position of the valve or actuator. However, this type of monitoring requires hard-wired connections from a controller to each valve and actuator to be monitored, which is both physically and economically limiting in a facility having thousands of valves and actuators to be monitored. Additionally, in facilities such as off shore oil rigs, the additional cost of running all the required wiring is particularly cost prohibitive.
To reduce the cost of hard-wiring sensors, wireless monitoring devices that utilize wireless sensors have been used in the industry. Wireless sensors allow for remote monitoring of valves and actuators, thereby removing the requirement of hard-wiring the position sensors from the valves and actuators to a controller. However, replacement of existing hard-wired position sensors with wireless monitoring devices requires the existing sensor housings to be replaced with new housings that contain the wireless monitoring devices. In existing systems, the ability to update the existing wired monitoring system with a wireless monitoring system could be cost prohibitive due to the labor required to replace the existing housings with new housings.
In addition to electronic monitoring, visual indicators have been used to provide a user with a visual indication of the position of a valve from a distance. This indication can be critical to an operator in the field who may not have access to the position information due to lack of access to the control system. Conventional visual indicators can couple to existing valve position sensor housings and are installed separately from the valve position sensor housings. While these visual indicators can be coupled to multiple housing types, thereby allowing for easy retrofitting to existing modules, these visual indicators only provide visual indication for a user. Thus, the visual indicators are only capable of providing valve or actuator position information to the user within a visual range of the visual indicator.
Thus, there is a need for a visual indication device with an integrated wireless monitoring device to allow for cost effective retrofitting of existing valve or actuator position sensing devices with wireless monitoring capabilities.